The New England Tableland is my new favourite place. Along with the Barrington Tops area, the New England region provides city-weary travelers with a natural haven of waterfalls, rainforest, ancient beech forest, and snow gum woodland - all with a healthy dose of the remote. As with Barrington Tops National Park, the public only get to access a small corner of New England National Park. The rest of the park? Not strictly off-limits, but very hard to get to. Think several day- to week-long hikes.

Also like Barrington Tops, large parts of the park are declared Word Heritage and both regions are among the few remaining tracts of montane rainforest and Antarctic Beech forest in New South Wales. The public access to New England National Park is mostly via the north-west corner of the park; there is a campsite, several national parks cabins, and numerous short walks to various lookouts and waterfalls.

Point Lookout:

Perhaps one of the best places to view the rest of the national park is from Point Lookout. At 1563m above sea level, it is the second-highest point in the region and (on a clear day) commands an uninterrupted view all the way down to the coast. The unspoilt wilderness of the rest of the park stretches far into the distance.

The first rays of sunlight at Point Lookout.

Without a doubt, sunrise is the most beautiful time to be at Point Lookout. The lookout faces directly east and catches the first rays of sunlight as the sun comes up over the ocean. On cold mornings there would be a thick fog down in the valley below the lookout and the rising sun would set it alight, as if on fire.

There are also several short walks from Point Lookout that take you through snow gum forest around the top of the escarpment or down into the Antarctic beech rainforest below the lookout.

Heath flowering along the escarpment at Point Lookout. The view here is looking south-east over the rest of the New England National Park.

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If you're ever in Brisbane or the Gold Coast, do yourself a favour and visit Lamington NP. Incredible sub-tropical rainforest, so many cool birds. Like this Paradise Riflebird. Sonya and I took my advice and spent a few days at Lamington after the Ecological Society of Australia conference in Brisbane a few weeks ago. Magical. .
#lamingtonnationalpark #binnaburra #paradiseriflebird #rainforest

#fieldworkfashion #phdlife #bloodyflies

Sometimes I wish I could make like an albatross and arch my wings and be taken by the wind to some far flung corner of the world where there is nothing but waves and uninhabited islands. But then I realise that's impossible because there is no corner on a globe.

My babies... this is the swan greenhood, the pollinating gnat mistakes that tiny black appendage for a female and tries to mate with it. Extraordinary what lengths plants will go to just to be pollinated!
#phdlife #fieldwork #pterostylis #pollination

Do I even dare say it...I bought a new lens! Yes, another one. And I'm just starting to get a feel for how it 'draws'
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#zeiss100mmf2 #zeiss #donkeyorchid orchid #macrophotography #macro_secrets